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Poll: Have Your Say on Christie’s, Democrats’ Competing Budget Plans

June 25, 2015

Are you in the 'blue' corner or the 'red?' Or are you one of those folks who thinks it doesn’t matter?

Democratic state legislators are expected to present Gov. Chris Christie with a $35.3 billion budget spending plan later today -- $1.6 billion in revenues more than the budget Christie sent to the Legislature earlier this year. The revenues would be gained through corporate tax hikes and an increase in income tax on earnings over $1 million a year.

Spending priorities in the two budgets are also different. The Democratic bill calls for restoring $2.8 billion in funding to the pension system, which the two sides agreed on four years ago. It provides $7.5 million for family-planning service clinics, a perennial fight that the Democrats have had with the governor since he took office and slashed the spending. And it increases funding for higher education.

Christie’s budget reduces the pension spending to $1.3 billion. He can line-item veto anything in the Democrats budget, including tax hikes and specific spending, but he can’t add anything.

What do you think? Who’s version are you more likely to support?

The governor’s version. He’s right to hold the line on taxes. We have serious issues facing us in this state, but we simply can’t rely on tax hikes to get us out of this problem. The rubber has finally met the road.

I support the Democrats on this one. Before the state does anything else, it has to live up to its pension obligations. The fact that we’ve ignored it for so long is exactly why we are in this mess. If it means more taxes on millionaires and large corporations, so be it.

There is room for compromise here, but sadly I don’t see it happening this year, if ever. The governor needs to focus on New Jersey, not the conservative states. And this budget seems to be pretty tepid coming from the Democrats. Are they already looking to 2017. Probably.

I don’t like either of these budgets because they don’t address the critical issues of this state. There is no investment in infrastructure and transportation, which is key if we want business to grow. Don’t people understand that one of our major assets is our location -- but only if we make it easy to get from one place to another. I’d support additional taxes for investment, but not just to maintain the status quo.

After all the noise, these budgets are very disappointing. It’s a failure of leadership. Christie will continue to prioritize whatever he thinks the red states and his corporate cronies will like: huge corporate tax breaks for moving but agreeing to stay in the state, socially conservative and pie-in-the-sky plans like more casinos, and rhetoric and actions that punish public employee unions. The Democrats don’t appear to be much better. They are ignoring the punishing issue of the ever-higher costs of public employees, in order to serve union interests. And they are not even trying to address the big issues like infrastructure investment that they claim to support. If they want to fix problems through raising even more taxes, fix some big problems!